Currently Untitled
by Goldenheart of RiverClan
Summary: Life is tough at Hell's Gate, but it's tougher when you're a kid, and even worse when you have to act like an adult. Now, your friends are on the edge of war, everyone you love is in danger, and you might just be able to stop it all…so what's a kid to do?
1. Prologue

**Brief Author's Notes:** Since I didn't have room in my cheesy little summary for this kind of stuff, I'm going to place my various and sundry warning labels here. Rated T for some obligatory bad language and sex jokes (my maturity level is in the negatives!). Veers off into some non-canon territory due to being OC-centric (an attempt at successfully pulling off a "child on Pandora" story, to be exact). Some OC pairings; Jake and Neytiri; Norm and Trudy; past Grace and Parker (just bear with me).

**Notes About This Particular Chapter:** Obviously, it is written in present tense, and takes place four years after the beginning of the story - a "how we got here" prologue. The first chapter will take place at the very beginning and so forth; they will all be written in the past tense. Other thing: most characters mentioned here are OCs. All canon characters play large roles in the story, but there are also a lot of OCs, major and minor.

**Necessary disclaimer: **I do not own Avatar or anything related to the franchise. Likewise, none of the songs/movies/bands/books that are namedropped at various points in the story belong to me. I only own the original characters and story!

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**Prologue**

**VIDEO LOG DIARY: #1357  
****USER: THORNTON, JAY CASH  
****9/16/2154, 3:21 P.M.**

"So, uh, there we have it."

I shift uncomfortably in my swivel chair, pondering what to say next.

"I can't believe it's already been four years since…since, well, you know what I'm talking about by now, don't you? I must have gone over it, like, twenty times over the course of those years."

_Jay, you're much too smart for this,_ I chide myself. Perhaps this was excusable four years ago, when I first found myself on Pandora. I was, after all, only ten years old, and video logs were completely foreign to me. I had no idea what I was even supposed to _say_ back then.

But by now, video logs have become absolutely normal to me, almost like I don't even have a choice whether I have to do one or not. I greet the camera and microphone like old friends; needless to say, they no longer daunt me.

So why am I having so much trouble now?

"Sorry I can't think very well today, whoever's listening to this—and by the way, whoever you are, for the last time, get the hell out of my stuff! Geez, if you're going through my video logs and you're still here, then shouldn't you have taken a hint by now? I can probably count on my fingers how many video logs where I _haven't_ told you to stop watching them! These are supposed to be _confidential_, dammit!"

At this point, I have to take a break from my diatribe both to catch my breath and to laugh at myself. So far on Pandora, I have done well over a thousand video logs, with (hopefully) many more to come, and now that I think about it, I seriously believe that the vast majority of them have some sort of warning to the effect of "stop going through my stuff or else" inserted somewhere in there. I don't even remember saying half of them. It's interesting how habits develop like that until you get to the point where you don't even realize what you're doing anymore.

"Uh, please disregard my little rant. It's time to get to the point, which is that I absolutely cannot believe that it's been four years since I, uh, 'arrived' here. Four years ago, to the minute, I was walking home with Clark and Jeremy by my side, thinking that it was just another school day. I had homework to do. I had made plans to see my best friend that weekend. Everything was normal. If someone had approached me four years ago and told me, right there and then, that all…all _this_ was going to happen to me in a relatively short time frame, I would have thought they were crazy. Just…just four years ago."

There's a long pause, punctuated only by the hiss of my breath as I think for a moment about my situation.

"Well, to _me_, it was only four years ago. To everybody else, it was almost a century and a half.

"That truly is astounding. Even from my four-years-ago point of view, I can hardly even remember my old life on Earth. I mean, the details are crystal clear and all, but it seems so…distant, like I'm just recalling a movie or a book—'it's not like it really _happened_ or anything,' to quote an unsung universal movie-watching mantra. Except it _did_ happen. It happened to _me_ not long ago, and I can hardly believe that it did. It's just plain surreal to think that it was, on the grand scale of things, so _recent_, but also so far away."

The very thought of such profound things as _time_ makes my hair bristle and my skin burst out in goosebumps, but what is really mind-breaking is the realization of just how arbitrary a concept it really is, especially considering my own personal situation.

If the passage of four years is enough to make me think, "Wow, it's hard to remember that even happened," then a hundred and fifty years is far beyond the boundaries of my fourteen-year-old perception, and that is something truly scary. As Sofia always said, "Time doesn't give a damn about you." While I don't normally agree with Sofia's sentiments, she's right about some things, and that is, sadly enough, one of them.

"I don't know what you call that. It might be a time _loop_, or a _rift_, or maybe a _fold_—or, if you want to be 'artsy' about it, a _wrinkle_. You know, like _A Wrinkle in Time_…yeah, difficult reference, I know. Time travel in fiction is mind-boggling enough, to say nothing of how screwed up it is in the real world. Right now, it looks like I'm going to be on Pandora for a while, maybe even for the rest of my life, so my goal is to try not to think about my little 'time travel' thing and hope that it didn't screw up the timeline forever."

After thinking about it even for just a mere few minutes, I have to rub my temples and clear my mind. It truly _is_ a confusing concept that only the world's sharpest minds can hope to begin to wrap their head around.

"Who knows? Maybe people are popping in and out of the timeline all the time, and we're just not aware, probably because they have the good sense not to go off and write a damn _tome_ about it."

What was that? Coming from _my_ mouth? I shake my head, amazed and disappointed in myself at the same time. That must have been my fifth "damn" so far, and I barely even noticed it. Pastor Ben would be ashamed of me.

"Geez, Jay, listen to yourself! Swearing like a sailor again. What would Mom think?"

Next to me, my printer emits a series of obnoxious beeps, hungry for more paper. Amazed that my current printing task is taking up so much paper and ink, I replace the cartridge and feed it another fifty pages or so with deft quickness gained from years of practice, hoping that will be enough to finish the job.

"Anyway, if you take things from my point of view, it's the four-year anniversary of the day I woke up from a nap and found myself on Pandora. A lot of stuff has happened since then, and now it's all coming to a hopefully peaceful close. In short, I couldn't see any better time to print off the first draft of my narrative. It's almost done now…"

I lean over to read the currently-printing page, which is very close to the beginning of the memoir. Since I reversed the page order when giving the printer its instructions, the thing should read from beginning to end when I pick it up and put it in my three-inch binder—thankfully, I made sure to use pre-hole-punched paper, so I won't have to worry about that, either.

"Yep, everything's all set. No details to bother with. As soon as it's done, I'm going to put it in this binder here and show it to everybody I know—at least the people I wrote nice things about, that is. I'm sure they'll love it. In fact, I think that I'll go show it to Tristan now. He's going to love it more than anybody!

"Of course, there's still one big problem, and that's the title...

"…by which I mean there _is_ no title."

With a laugh, I reach for the still-hot first page and flash it at the log camera. It sports a huge, emboldened Papyrus-font heading reading, quite simply, "Currently Untitled." Obviously intended to be a placeholder for a real future title, it has become familiar and charmingly unusual, at least to me, after seeing it in big bold letters at the top of my epic narrative document for years.

"This big ol' bastard has rejected nearly every title I've thrown at it. I can't even remember most of them—I type a one-word title on a whim, promptly decide that it has no significant bearing on the story, is to cheesy, or what have you, and then delete it. I think the longest time this has had an official title was, like, one month—_Look Through My Eyes_, after my favorite song, deleted because I thought it was too obvious.

"This isn't the first time I've had this problem, of course—as someone who loves to record my thoughts and anecdotes in writing, I can say that I have _always_ sucked at giving my works creative titles. They sound too much like something a fourteen-year-old girl would write, and I can't have that, now, can I?"

I sigh and put the title—or no-title—page of the story back on the top of the stack before I have the chance to wrinkle it up.

"On second thought, I kind of like '_Currently Untitled_' as it is. It's got some character to it—at least _I_ think it does. Who knows? Maybe it'll stay like that, maybe it won't. Only time will tell. And now, I don't have the time to brood over titles. I have to show this to my friends while it's still hot off the press!

"Well, I'll show it to the people I wrote good things about, anyway. I think that might exclude Sofia—or maybe she'll actually appreciate it. But haven't I screwed with her life enough already? I'm just going to wait until she makes a bit more sense of things, and then I'll show it to her. Then she can look back on it and smile. Or cry. Or relapse. You know what? Maybe I'll just hold off for a while longer."

How many people can I show this to without offending them, now that I'm coming to terms with the effect of all the recent chaos? I trace patterns across the table with my finger, determined not to cry. So many absent friends…and not one of them deserved any of the crap that happened to them.

"And I guess it excludes Jake, too, at least for now. For, um, obvious reasons. I guess I should apologize for being so bitter to him. Puberty will do that to a person, after all, but still…

"Oh! Duh! I'll show it to Tsanten, and all the others! How could I forget them? I'll take it with me today, in fact, right now!"

I stand up from my chair and grab my stack of papers, careful not to dog-ear any of the pages as I slide them over the rings of my open binder. With a smile, I close it and turn to the video log camera.

"So, I have to go. Tsanten and I are going to go baby-sit Ralu and Eana and some of the other kids today, and I might have to get some reinforcements to help.

"This is Jay Cash Thornton, avatar driver and amateur authoress, signing off!"

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**Closing Notes: **I'm so glad I finally got the prologue down pat . It must have taken ten rewrites before I felt comfortable with it! Now, for the record, I had earlier promised myself that I would not stoop to doing a character video log as an introduction, since video logs in general have been done to death as a method of exposition, but here's the rub: it _works_. That is my reasoning.

Like everybody says, please **Read and Review**! _Any_ type of feedback (excluding flames, naturally) on _any _aspect of the story is absolutely welcome!

**P. S. ~ **I give my most sincere thanks to anyone who even gave the story this much of a chance, since I have spent a lot of effort just plotting it. "Currently Untitled" is the story's real title, and it's explained in the story, but it isn't good for curb appeal - if you've come this far, you're a noble soul. The summary wasn't even that great. So, thanks, and I do hope to hear what you have to say!


	2. Where It Started

**Author's Notes:** I felt compelled to add this on, because the first chapter alone seemed too heavy-handed, so I think that this pushes the plot hook back a little bit more and foreshadows more of the main character's conflict. However, I think I may have taken it too far in the other direction and made this too obvious. Am I just fretting over nothing? Am I incapable of being subtle in my writing? I guess time and further updates will tell...

In addition, the following two chapters, as well as a series of flashbacks in later chapters, have original characters in them that are based upon my real-life friends, family, etc. However, I have changed their names and interests to ensure that they will not be recognized, nor will they recognize themselves (except in a few egregious cases, where I have made a game of challenging my friends to read this and see if they can spot themselves). Know that it was all done in good fun, and in a loving manner. Take everything written here with a grain of salt.

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**Chapter 1: Where it Started**

"It all started when…"

Years ago, back when I was little, I promised myself I would never, ever use that phrase to open any essay or any short story I wrote, much less an entire memoir. It was something that I had grown tired of over the years, because, being a young girl whose elementary school emphasized literacy and writing skills, I had heard it on almost every classmate's writing paper since kindergarten, since we were mostly too young and too stupid to care if our introductions were creative or not. Mind you, that generalization includes me as well. Back in those early years, my opinion on writing was that I shouldn't have to do it at all, either by hand or via computer—now, I've discovered writing to be my truest passion, thanks mostly to my learning how to type. To think that I once despised it is almost unnerving. It's like thinking about a different person altogether.

But then, I cared little about writing, so naturally, _that_ was not the reason that I had promised never to open a paper with the stock phrase, "It all started when…"

I have no doubt that the real reason behind it is that I am a natural and die-hard contrarian, and a stubborn one at that. I have been since I can remember, and probably before. It may be one of my greatest character traits sometimes—it kept me from going along with the stupidity of the masses (preteenaged masses are particularly stupid), and keeps me from doing so today.

It may also be one of my greatest flaws.

"Mary, Mary, quite contrary," my mother, Callie Thornton, used to say to me, shaking her finger and smiling, always with a wry sparkle in her eyes. "That's what we should have named you." Then, she would shake her head and scoop me up in her arms, at least until I got too heavy for her after her surgery. "I told your father that when I was pregnant—I could just sense it. But he liked Jay much better."

Even my _name_ is contrary. People are always surprised whenever my parents tell them my name—first, middle, and last always—before they meet the very much female child behind it. I get a National Geographic Kids subscription every month addressed to _Mr. _Jay Cash Thornton, among other things, which is kind of cool. I'm even so contrary that I'm actually _proud_ of it.

Yes, I'm certain of it—it all started because I'm just too stubborn and too oppositional. If I had gone with the flow my whole life, none of this would have ever come to pass…yet, I wouldn't trade any of it for the world. But that only answers the question of why this started, not when.

Really, who can say exactly when it all started, anyway?

"If you want to get technical," I imagine my childhood friend Clark would say, if I somehow got to tell him about all this, "it started when you were born. Everything that _ever_ happened to you did."

If Clark said that, then I suppose Drake might retort, "And if you want to be up-front about it and not dig too deep, it started at the beginning of the fifth grade, with Mrs. Bean."

I had no idea what Jeremy might say. He would probably throw out one suggestion, then reconsider it, then throw out several more ideas out loud, until somebody who had no business sticking his nose in our affairs would tell him to shut up. That was the one thing that always got on Jeremy's nerves.

"I have Asperger's Syndrome," he felt compelled to remind us all fairly often. "It makes me talk to myself out loud sometimes. So what? I don't see anything wrong with it."

I imagine that Nathan would take a similar approach, adjusting the scope to wider—my birth, my parents' wedding, the formation of the universe, and so on—and smaller points—the fifth grade, or my tenth birthday—as he saw fit, never being fully satisfied. Nobody _ever_ told _him_ to shut up, but he did not have Asperger's Syndrome or any other such disorder; he was simply really odd, and also fairly popular and well-liked, so I guess all that combined meant he got a free pass for doing such things.

This always drove Jeremy crazy, though he never showed any resentment toward Nathan himself for it.

And lastly, I imagine that Tess, Misty, and Dan wouldn't give a hoot where it started; all they knew was that it started sometime and someplace, and it didn't bear thinking about—to them._ I_ thought it required some thinking about.

So, barring events such as my birth and the formation of the universe, that most likely left my school years.

It probably didn't start in kindergarten. That was the year in which I had no friends in school. I did my work, I played with the alphabet blocks, and I sifted through the gravel out in the playground at recess. This worried my mother, who started to come to school with me in the morning when I told her, "I didn't really make any friends today, Mom," every single day when prompted. Not that it bothered me in the least.

"There are so many sweet kids in your class," she said after about a week of observing. "What's the name of that girl who always says hi when you walk into class?"

"Which girl?"

"The one with the black hair at her shoulders."

I had no idea that anybody had been saying hi to me, and shrugged it off. I stayed alone for the rest of the year, and it did nothing to affect me. I had many close friends outside of school, anyway.

Perhaps it started in the first grade. That was the year I met Jeremy, after remaining alone for another month.

I remember that I was in charge of delivering the attendance to the office for the week, and…well, he was in trouble for asking Miss Aisle to leave him alone.

"Well, that wasn't _exactly_ what happened," he later admitted, after saying that all he had done was ask her to stop being mean to him. "I mean, she wasn't being very nice and all. She hasn't been nice to me at all. I guess I just…had it. I yelled at her and ran out of the room. They rounded me up here." He shrugged and smiled. He was always more cheerful back then. "So, what are you in for?"

"I'm the attendance girl for Mrs. Meyer."

"_Fantastic_. I have nobody to share my misery with." He shook his head. "My mom says I have Asperger's Syndrome."

"You mean you're one of those kids who moons people from the back of the bus?"

"No. She says it's a form of high-functioning autism."

"Okay." I forced on a smile and waved. "Well, good luck. I have to go back now. See you!"

That day, I asked my mom what Asperger's Syndrome—and autism—was. She told me that she had once suspected me of having it, but after running me through some tests, she concluded that I was just a bit obstinate and not much for change. That was also the day I became familiar with the term "contrarian."

Jeremy and I didn't see each other at recess for a week—no surprise, considering that he probably got into trouble a lot—but by coincidence, Mrs. Meyer and Miss Aisle's classes shared a lunch table. That week, Jeremy sat with me at lunch every day, and we really hit it off. We agreed on most things, and had a lot of the same ideas, not to mention our varying quirks.

When I told my mother about him, she immediately declared that Miss Aisle was not equipped with the patience to teach first graders, let alone one with autism, and called Jeremy's mother. She introduced herself as the mother of Jeremy's friend from school and invited him to transfer classes.

Jeremy was in my class for the rest of the year starting the very next week, and so it stayed for many years.

Clark joined us in the second grade, and I must admit that for a while, I missed the two-person dynamic. I missed me and Jeremy just sitting, talking. I missed always having one partner for two-person assignments and not having to choose. But more than that, I missed when I could be in line, and the line would stop suddenly, and the person behind me wouldn't bump into me every single time.

That was what it was like with Clark. He had a crush on me, it seemed, and had since we met. I had no idea why. I wasn't very crushable. I was whisper-quiet, and hardly came out of my shell talking to anybody except Jeremy, because I was already familiar with him.

Jeremy-Jay-Clark. That was the order in which we sat at lunch, always. At least, at first it was me and Jeremy and Clark. Then, it became either me and Jeremy, or me and Clark, and the latter was prevalent. Clark never gave me a moment's peace at lunch, or anywhere, pressing his face almost directly up to mine and reading in a painfully slow and monotone voice out of his stupid Kid's Almanac 2006.

Every day at lunch, our nurse, Mrs. Macintosh, would come bearing a little plastic cup full of pills for Clark. He often took them with great reluctance, but one day, it seemed he didn't want to take them at all. He screamed and kicked at the nurse and taunted her to call Principal Rodriguez, who arrived and carried Clark, still kicking and screaming, out of the room in short order.

That day, I told my mother about the event.

"Clark has bipolar disorder," she informed me. "When he was still in the womb, his mother decided that she did not want him. She took drugs and smoked and drank alcohol and fell down stairs and did all sorts of things, trying to kill him. When he was born, she put him up for adoption. Mark a few streets away took him in."

"Him and his friend Michael? No wonder Clark's messed up. They're _really_ weird."

"Uh…" Mom hesitated. "I wouldn't call Mark and Michael _friends_, honey. Hasn't Clark told you that he has two dads?"

Only in the third grade did I learn exactly what that meant. I learned a lot about what such things meant that year, actually, thanks to Dan.

Dan was new at Westlake that year, and by chance, he sat at the same table with me and Clark and Jeremy.

"Hey, I'm Dan. Dan Fallow," he greeted us, letting his weight go as he plopped into his chair. He was huge for a third grader.

"Shoot." Dan shook his head and looked around the room. "This is real different from where I went to school. I went to some ghetto school in another part of town. Don't know which, or what it was called. Shoot."

I tried to make small talk, making sure he knew he was welcome. "Must be hard to move to a new place like that."

"Right in the middle of my career, too!" He slammed his fist down on the table, then sighed. "Actually, it wasn't that hard. Everyone there hated me. Prob'ly 'cause I'm black."

"But…wasn't everyone black there?" asked Clark.

"Dude, how would _you_ know?" Dan burst out.

"But you said it was a ghetto school!"

Dan leaned forward inches from Clark's face with his fist raised like he was going to punch him, then sank back into his chair, releasing the air from his lungs. "Damn racist."

"I'm not a racist!" Clark defended himself. Jeremy and I exchanged worried glances. We could already tell that Clark was asking for trouble. They both seemed hot-blooded, and the worst part was that Dan could probably crush him like a bug. "My gay dads are Mexican!"

"Mexican? Aw, shoot, you're a white boy!" Dan was silent for a moment, then seemed to have some sort of delayed epiphany. His eyes lit up as he said, "Wait, your dads are _gay_? Do they still get booty?"

Jeremy spat out his orange juice and reached over to cover my ears. I brushed him off and told him that I could plug my _own_ ears, thank you very much, but not after Clark told him that he had walked in on his dads recently, while leading his baby sister by the hand.

"It was rated U for Ugly," he informed us all cheerfully. Dan bawled and moaned like he was about to throw up, all while laughing. In fact, he laughed so hard he actually _did_ throw up (all over the desk, too), and that was the last Clark and Jeremy saw of him for the day.

I, on the other hand, was the one responsible for escorting him to the nurse.

"Shoot, that's not going to do my reputation any good," Dan muttered. "I know everyone here's gonna hate me. This school looks all _proper_ 'n' stuff, and I got some depression going on. I take meds. By the way, what's your name?"

"Jay Cash Thornton, at your service."

"That's a funny name for a girl." He squinted and crinkled his nose, looking me over with scrutiny. "Are you a drag queen?"

Of course, Dan had to explain exactly what a drag queen _was_, which I thought was the weirdest thing I'd ever heard.

"Well," I said, trying to find the positive, "you learn something new every day. And I'm not one."

There was silence as I pushed open the door to the main hallway, until Dan said, "I ain't got no love at home. My parents never even gave me a hug as a kid."

"You still _are_ a kid!"

"All I really need is a friend." Dan shuffled his feet as we approached the doorway of the nurse's office.

"Shoot," I said with a welcoming grin, "we'll be your friends. There's always room for one more in our group!"

Mrs. Macintosh appeared at the door and pulled Dan into her office. As I turned to go back to class, he shouted after me, "'Shoot'? That's _my_ word!"

Third grade was also the year that I met Tess. Our meeting was similar to mine and Jeremy's—I was doing some work on the bench, making up for a sick day, and Tess was in trouble. For what, she wouldn't specify.

"Yeah, it's the ADHD," she said. "I get in trouble a lot."

"Well, good luck with that, then." I pretended to write down some more answers to my questions, but Tess called my bluff by looking over my shoulder, unbeknownst to me.

"Hey!" She laughed and threw her arm around my shoulders, squeezing me tight. "You're not writing anything! Talk to me!"

I did—I told her about how my weekend was, how I had been sick for a few days, how my first-ever Girl Scout cookies season was coming up (she said that she used to be a Girl Scout). Then I told her about my friends, and her nose wrinkled a bit. She put her arm around my shoulder again and squeezed even tighter.

"Tess." Ms. Bernard's voice came from the teachers' bench behind us. "Stop talking to her! You're supposed to be in time-out."

"But why?"

"For putting bugs on Analise's back!"

"Yes, Ms. Bernard." Tess lowered her voice and pulled me away from the bench. "I'm new here, and I don't know everyone who's in my class. Which teacher do you have?"

"Ms. Bernard."

"Great!" She wrapped me in a crushing bear-hug. "Me, too! I'll ask her if I can move to sit next to you tomorrow! I'll see you then!"

Tess tried to hog me much as Clark did, and seemed to only tolerate my friends because I absolutely refused to leave them. She constantly had her arm around me, touching my hair, telling me how I would look so great in torn jeans and a low-cut shirt and some high-sheen lip gloss. She told me what shampoo to use, what bath gels I should by, and what earrings I should get. "What do you mean, you don't _want_ any?" was her mantra for the entire semester, and longer. Eventually, however, she became more accustomed to my reluctance to change, as well as the group dynamic.

The fourth grade was a wonderful year. Our group was strong as ever, and our numbers grew by three more before the year was out. I suspect it was the direct result of Jeremy, as a joke, making a cardboard sign reading "Misfits Welcome Here" and hanging it around my neck. For an entire week, he made me wear it whenever we could get away with it, and when he caught my trying to put it in my desk, he called me out and watched for several minutes, making sure I kept it on. When Jeremy got something in his head, even something as trivial as that, he could _never_ let it go.

First came Misty. Our meeting was unremarkable enough—we were partners for an exercise in PE, we struck up a conversation, we learned each other's names and remembered that we were in the same class, and she moved to our group's table.

She was a lovely girl, with a line of freckles bridging her cheeks and loose, long copper curls down to her back. She had a bright smile and laugh and a skip in her step that seemed full of potential, and it wasn't hard to tell she was very smart.

"I do well in school 'cause I take all sorts of meds," she told us once, pulling out a bag of pills from her pocket. "This one is for my ADHD—it's _really_ bad. This one is for my bipolar. This is for my dyslexia…"

After school, when Jeremy, Clark and I were walking home, Jeremy asked me, "So, what do you think of her now?"

"Wow…" I shook my head. "I've never met somebody who has _every disorder known to man_."

"I don't think she has a very good home life," said Jeremy. "She's taking care of two younger siblings and wearing low-cut shirts! Think about it: she said her mom named her after an obscure alcoholic beverage! Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

"My birth name is Samuel Adams," Clark said, sounding slightly offended. "Of course, with my birth mom being a drunk and a druggy and all…"

"Aren't you glad your dads named you something different?"

"Yep."

Then came Nathan, about halfway through the first semester. Even then, Nathan seemed odd, but still fairly popular in the "underground" crowd—the "theater kids" mostly, with his eccentric personality and strange mannerisms, which he kept up willfully rather than out of habit or some chronic disorder. He was mostly friends with me and Jeremy and Misty, though he dutifully reached out to the others, and somehow got sucked into our group in that odd, subtle way that our new members always did. Throughout the rest of the year and the fifth grade, he remained the only group member with enough personality and connections to straddle our coven and the mainstream population.

And lastly, there was Drake.

Drake came to us midway through the school year after Christmas break, and when he was introduced to the class and allowed to sit wherever he wanted, he picked a chair next to our table and started to strike up a conversation with us. We all had an unspoken agreement then: He was to be our new member, one way or another. Any new student who sat next to us seemed to immediately become one.

Jeremy was the first to tell him this, and by that point, he, like the rest of us, had wised up enough to ask him, "And what's wrong with _you_?"

"What?" Drake was taken aback, and started to laugh wryly. "What do you mean, what's wrong with me? What's wrong with _you_?"

"Asperger's Syndrome," Jeremy answered, even though Drake was probably not expecting one. He had little concept of rhetorical questions; he neither asked them nor left them unanswered when asked.

"I have bipolar disorder," said Clark. "My mom didn't want me and tried to miscarry me. I'm adopted and I have two gay dads. But, uh,"—he threw a glance at me and put his hand on mine—"I'm not gay."

I brushed him off as gently as I could. I didn't have the heart to break it to him that what he felt was not mutual. I was far too young for a boyfriend, and with him, likewise, though he didn't necessarily understand this.

"And I got depression," Dan chimed in.

Tess: "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder."

"And I," began Misty, as she prepared for her speech, "have ADHD, bipolar disorder, dyslexia, maybe some autism, and, uh…I forget what else. My mom drank a lot and did drugs when she was pregnant with me and my brother and sister. I have to look after them. She's usually out drinking with my new stepdad." She added cheerfully, "They're thinking about taking me off some of my medication!"

"I…see…" muttered Drake. "And what about you two?" he asked, looking toward me and Nathan.

"Pay no mind to me," Nathan replied. "I'm just really weird."

"And you?"

I beamed and shrugged. "Nothing, really. Just a misfit magnet, I guess. They're all mostly _my_ friends, but we're pretty tight."

"Well…" Drake rocked back and forth on his toes, a mischievous grin on his face. "Uh, I'm not disabled or anything. I'm just a new kid from Melody Academy, and you know how Melody kids are around here…"

"I went to Melody in the first grade," Clark said. "Welcome aboard."

That appeared to be the final number for the year: me, Jeremy, Clark, Dan, Tess, Misty, Nathan, and Drake, and so it has been ever since.

After the first conversation with Drake, I approached my teacher, Ms. Cornfield, after school one day, asking her, "Why do all my friends have disorders?"

"What do you mean?" she asked.

I immediately launched into a long explanation of how I had met all my friends and how much trouble I had almost gotten into with them over the years—guilt by association, she called it—and how they had always been there to get me out. I described all their idiosyncrasies, good and bad, in minute detail, and gave anecdotes so that she could hear how they worked in action.

To this day, I have no idea how much of my life story I told to Ms. Cornfield, but after I was done, I was practically panting, and she just sat there with a broad smile on her face. "I have the perfect answer for you," she said. "You yourself may have a condition after all: you attract needy people."

"I didn't need anybody to tell me that!" I made sure to laugh so she would know I was joking. "But _why_?"

"I've always attracted needy people, too, Jay. Remember that. It's a good thing. Folk like you are usually very good folk. Kind, affectionate, always loyal, always accepting, very forgiving of people's faults and failings, can see the good in just about everyone…"

"Are they _contrarians_?" I asked, proud of being able to use the word in context.

After Ms. Cornfield stopped laughing, she quieted entirely, tapping her chin, considering this for the longest time. She finally answered, "I guess in a way, they are. They make it a point to be nice to people that not everybody else is nice to, and they're often rewarded with friends for life."

I left the school without a care in the world, walking alongside Jeremy and Clark as I always did; only now, I felt a new, stronger affection and appreciation for these wonderful, quirky friends. As soon as I got home, I took out a pencil and a notepad, and wrote down everything Ms. Cornfield had said.

"Loyalty," I muttered as I wrote, "acceptance…forgiveness…affection…see the good in everybody."

Afterward, I wrote "Jay Cash Thornton's Code of Honor" at the top in the best cursive I could muster, and took out a pushpin and stuck the paper on my bulletin board, where I could see it and remember it every day.

I'll never forget that piece of paper. Not for as long as I live.

* * *

**Closing Notes: **So, what do you think? Please review if you have anything to say, and constructive (_constructive_!) criticism is always appreciated. Thanks for your time. (And yes, this is still an _Avatar_ fanfic. A loose fanfic, granted, but it's set in the universe of _Avatar_, and the canon characters do play large roles. We'll get to that.)


	3. The Fifth Grade

**Author's Notes****:** This has been pushed to Chapter 2, obviously, to make room for the newer Chapter 1. Some smaller revisions made. At this point, I would like to remind everyone that yes, we _are_ still on the subject of the _Avatar _universe. The next chapter will finally make that clear. Just makin' sure...

* * *

**Chapter 2: The Fifth Grade**

**Westlake Elementary, Austin, TX; Year 2010**

Earth Day always comes around twice when you're in the fifth grade at Westlake Elementary.

Or thrice. Four times, maybe, if you're really unfortunate. Even five.

On second thought, let's just suffice it to say that in Mrs. Bean's class, whether you're in her homeroom or just her regular Language Arts class, every day is Earth Day.

I was the first one of my class to walk into the room on the first day of school, and nearly threw up at the sight. The normal bland beige walls were nowhere to be seen, instead covered completely by stick-ons with Peace symbols, Beatles song lyrics written in chunky fonts, and countless murals of psychedelic designs, that hypnotic weave of swirling, cascading streaks of color into geometric patterns and shapes. The bookshelf was painted in a similar way, the whiteboard drawn on with every different Expo color in existence, and the reading area covered in beanbags and pink shag carpets.

Like so many other aspects of Mrs. Bean's teaching style, had it not been done in such an overwhelming and heavy-handed fashion, it would have been rather cool.

Such was the over-the-top decoration of the room that I didn't even notice Mrs. Bean sitting at her desk in the corner for quite some time, until she scared me out of my skin by shouting a greeting to me.

From the moment I managed to distinguish the outline of her long tie-dyed dress from the patterns on the wall, the oily gray ponytail that reached past her waist, the numerous Greenpeace pins and whatnot on her teacher's lanyard, and the freaking _wheatgrass shake_ in her hand, there was no mistaking it: she was one of _them_.

I sat down, observing the decorations with the nausea welling up in my stomach, only looking away to see Jeremy walking into the classroom. He was clearly as horrified and fascinated by the room as I was, moving ever so slowly closer to take a seat by me.

When Mrs. Bean left to go get another shake, there was a one-second pause between the clicking shut of the door and him saying, "There's a hippie if I ever saw one," as if I couldn't see it for myself. "Mark my words: For people like you and me, this class is gonna be hell."

Nathan and Drake came in at about the same time and sat by us. They both agreed that the room was enough to make them vomit.

"What the hell _is_ all this crap?" Nathan immediately started to run about the room, flamboyantly singing the Beatles lyrics on the wall and doing the best hippie impression he could muster, considering that he was so overwhelmed by all the over-the-top material to play off of that he couldn't even get his thoughts together. "Oh, I _love_ the environment, taking showers wastes water, save the whales…_Imagine all the people_…"

If only we known just how right he was…

"Yet, the last time I checked, he was straight. Hard to believe, isn't it?" muttered Drake as he sat in his chair, sipping a carton of orange juice as he watched Nathan continue his act. "Great, breakfast and a show."

Mrs. Bean returned just as a gob of tittering girls mobbed one of the other tables in the room, followed by several more students, many of whom I already recognized. The teacher saw it a good time to pass around a stack of Getting To Know You questionnaires, which meant that she had to hover close to the desks, and thus close to the students' noses.

Dan slunk into his chair next to Drake just as Mrs. Bean was passing out the papers to our table—every single nose in the room was crinkled for several seconds after she moved on.

I don't care _what_ they say in those Saving Water presentations that every kid is forced to watch every year, five minutes is not enough time for a woman with a long and greasy ponytail to take a good shower. Furthermore, nobody over the age of ten could get away with going three days without a shower, at least not without people noticing; in fact, fifty-year-olds like her are oily and germs can breed under the flaps of their skin, so if anything, they need to shower _more_ than once a day.

"Aw, shoot," Dan whispered to me in his deep drawl, "that lady need a shower."

I thought I could see Mrs. Bean's eyes glinting in his direction, but I wasn't sure. Her sharp cheekbones and nose in conjunction with her slightly droopy skin made her look hawklike, and there was no doubt that she had hawk-sharp eyes.

Soon before the tardy bell, Tess and Clark entered the room and were approached personally by Mrs. Bean. She welcomed them to the class and inviting them to pick their own seats, and so, my table was then plus two members.

"Boy, I think someone needs a shower," Clark told me, trying not to laugh. He tried to talk to me more, but I silenced him on the grounds that I needed to pay attention to the teacher.

Drake had an impish, almost serene smile on his face. "My mom says that it's polite to give the teacher a gift sometime during the first week," he said when Mrs. Bean was over at her desk taking attendance. "I say screw the gift card. I'm getting her some deodorant. And soap. A whole freakin' basket of soap."

"I would imagine that she could take a hint," Jeremy agreed.

"Oh!" chipped in Tess. "Get her some lavender soap. She seems like a lavender woman." She paused for a moment, tapping her gel pen on her chin, which left it covered in purple dots. "On second thought, maybe incense-scented soap, and some lavender shampoo, and maybe…spearmint conditioner? It sounds a bit weird, but it might work. Jay, does that sound good?"

I shrugged. I had always been a connoisseur of bath gels and soaps, spending much of my time at the mall with Tess (she was a chronic mall-dweller) at Bath and Body Works and actually looking forward to visits to Linens 'N' Things with my mom, but Tess was the master, so much so that she did not feel the _need_ to visit Bath and Body Works unless it was to buy something, which took all of ten seconds. She knew the scent of every product by name, and knew more about shampoo and hair serums than your average professional hair specialist.

(On the other hand, I believe I once used some sort of hair serum to get the stench of garlic and oil out of my clothes after a messy game at a summer camp. It wasted the entire bottle and then some other stuff I mixed in with it, but I'd say it worked pretty well, though my underwear never quite lost the faint scent of Italian food, and always bore the oil stains on the back.)

"Well, _I _think it sounds good." Tess shrugged and returned to coloring an intricate border on her paper.

Misty walked in ten minutes after the tardy bell and had to deliver a tardy slip to Mrs. Bean at her desk. When she sat down at the end of my table, she made a disgusted face and told us all (loudly) how bad Mrs. Bean had smelled.

That's when she noticed the room's decorations, which silenced her for a good long while as she stared at them with glassy eyes.

"Think she's high on something?" whispered Jeremy.

"Probably."

A few minutes later, Misty snapped out of her trance and remembered Mrs. Bean, and apparently decided to take some direct action.

"Yo, Teach!" she yelled across the room. Mrs. Bean looked up from her attendance sheet and showed some worn white teeth. "It's the first day of school! You oughtta celebrate by takin' a ten-minute shower!"

Mrs. Bean still forced on a smile.

"Hey, you could celebrate your un-first-school-days, too! That means you could take a long shower every day!"

"Misty, do your paper, please," said Mrs. Bean.

"I dunno. That long ponytail needs a lot o' washin'!"

The next day, Mrs. Bean came to school with her hair in a neat bob around her face, nice and short and reasonably clean, and so it stayed.

She smelled better after that, though her clothes still carried the remnants of spilled wheatgrass juice. I figured I could put up with that, and decided to accept victory and start focusing on learning from her as my teacher.

It wasn't long after that I grew to absolutely adore Mrs. Bean. Despite her fanatical environmentalist beliefs, which she expounded upon at great length at random points throughout the day (we, as her homeroom students, had her for Social Studies, Language Arts, and for a homework hour at the end of the day, giving her plenty of opportunities), her head teemed with other brilliant ideas that echoed my beliefs much more closely, which she also tended to discourse on.

A lover of poetry and classic literature, Mrs. Bean read to us a new story or poem every day, and through it, we took levels in literary aptitude without even realizing it. I loved the stories especially. _The Most Dangerous Game_. _The Necklace_. Sections from _To Kill A Mockingbird_; parts of _A Separate Peace_; all of _The Giver_; Shakespeare's works; and even _The Lord of the Rings_, which Drake and I already adored passionately.

She always, always engaged the class with her brilliant analyses, intriguing assignment prompts that almost everyone enjoyed doing, and, above all, her ability to waste most of the class talking in her eccentric, theatrical manner. No matter what she was talking about, she always managed to get the class's full attention.

And she knew it, too, easily able to deploy her own melodramatic way of speaking to great effect during her "green lectures," as Jeremy termed them.

The vast majority of the class remained firmly spellbound, but after a while, my willing suspension of disbelief was almost at its end. I began to realize that every single lecture boiled down to the same points, until it just became a jumbled, unbroken stream of thoughts, as if Mrs. Bean forgot for a while that she was a teacher with an organized lesson plan and started acting like she was simply musing in front of a hippie commune.

Hippie banter is something that I have very little tolerance and even less liking for, especially the stuff about how humans are terrible and aren't part of nature and should never have existed, and that's always been the case with her. By mid-September, I had grown sick and tired of hearing about the world's mistakes and shortcomings, and tried to tune her out most of the time.

Drake began to lose interest as well.

"I'm learning Esperanto. It's not like I have anything better to do when she's rambling," he told me one day, while Mrs. Bean was going on in the background. He pointed to his Cornell notes (the district's preferred note-taking style) full of words and definitions and his own annotations. "It's fun. You ought to try it."

"Why?"

"Because if there's anybody I can count on to actually stick with it, even though it's actual _work_, it's you."

Drake was such a geek, but a smart geek, no doubt about that. No, scratch "smart," he was _brilliant_, and had "future English major" written all over him—in his vocabulary, his speech patterns, his comprehension, everything. He always told me that I also had some really bright potential in the field of linguistics, and that I was the only person his age he could rely on for competition, which is why he suggested Esperanto to me and nobody else.

I smiled and told him I'd take it up.

The next day, Jeremy brought a book of optical illusions to class, which he showed to everyone at our table.

"I'm thinking about going into hypnosis as a hobby," he said, sounding proud of himself. "I love things like this."

The idea of bringing that book to class didn't work out so hot for him. Misty took it for the last hour, much to high-strung Jeremy's annoyance, and couldn't stop staring at it like she stared at the room's walls. I suspect that she was high or drunk or both to be so fascinated by it, which wasn't good, but it was the order of the day with Misty. I was just glad that she was being quiet.

The next day, I brought a Klutz-brand book about paper airplanes, and started folding them in class. As the hour passed, I managed to fold ten before the bell rang, and was satisfied that I had found a new way to keep the time rolling while tuning Mrs. Bean out. Since I had a hobby, I figured that the rest of the school year wouldn't be so hard to handle.

* * *

Our group's going-home patterns were firmly set, and my friends were such creatures of habit that it always stayed that way. Tess, Dan, and Misty always rode the short bus; Drake got picked up by his mother; Nathan rode another bus; and Clark, Jeremy and I all walked together to my house, and from there the two boys went their separate ways to get home.

This particular walk was slow and awkward, for reasons I could hardly understand. _Probably another one of those scenes where Clark gets all tense and might snap at any moment,_ I thought, _and I can't have that._

"So…" I kicked at a Pepsi can with my thumbs in my pockets, hoping that the casual energy would assuage the crackling tension. "Mrs. Bean really is into that environmentalist stuff, huh?"

"I noticed that you guys weren't paying attention. None of you were," Clark said. "Except for me."

I could see that Jeremy had to bite his lip. "You're still listening to her, Clark? Really?"

Clark gave him his signature smoldering glare. He had intense hazel-blue eyes set in a sharply-defined, tan face, all under the shadow of his cropped hair, a look that was especially good for glaring at people.

"I care about the environment." He crossed his arms and hunched his shoulders over. "I care a lot. Did you know that every day, acres and acres of rainforests are destroyed to make room for new slums and stuff?"

Jeremy and I rolled our eyes.

"And that trees are supposed to eat carbon, but there aren't enough trees and too much carbon, so all that carbon just stays in the air and traps heat. That's what causes global warming."

"We _know_, Clark."

"And cow farts—"

"We know about the freaking cow farts!" Jeremy burst out. "The reason we stopped listening to Mrs. Bean is because we _knew_ that crap already!"

_Well said, Jem, well said._

Clark didn't appreciate that in the slightest. I could sense a fight breaking out as we stepped into my driveway, and that was something we couldn't have. I was tired of talking about the environment, anyway.

I kicked the can one last time. "We just got a new washer. It's bright maroon, like our van."

"Is it a top load or a front load?" asked Clark.

Confused, I stared at him blankly, waiting for an explanation. Clark could be cryptic like that, taking it as a given that everyone else would know what he was talking about.

"Do you load it from the top or the front?"

"Oh! Front. What does that matter?"

Clark narrowed his eyes like I was crazy or stupid or both. "Because if you have a top load, it wastes energy and kills the environment."

It kills the environment. Of _course_.

This time, it was my turn to cast him a glare. "Clark, that's ridiculous. Owning a top load doesn't mean you're going to kill the planet. One washer won't matter," I chided him. In the process, I didn't bother to tell him that our old washer was a top load, and we'd had it for twice as long as I'd been alive.

I squared off to aim the abandoned can into the dumpster, kicked, and made a perfect shot.

Clark said something that sounded like, "Shoot, you missed the recycle bin. Better luck next time." Of course, I didn't hear it at first; I was too busy giving Jeremy a high-five.

I pumped my fists in the air shouted a half-joking celebratory "She shoots, she scores!" before realizing what Clark had said. It was too late to cover my tracks now, and I felt my face get a bit hot.

"You _aimed_ for that dumpster, didn't you?" He shook his head. "Geez, how hard can it be to recycle a can?"

"_Aargh_! Clark, would you _please_—" I threw a glance at Jeremy, who was biting his lip to keep from laughing again. He could probably see my steam rising to the top with every word Clark said. The boy was certainly pushing all the right buttons, almost as if he was trying to annoy me.

Well, two could play that game, I decided.

"It's too late now, anyway," I said with deliberate nonchalance, bordering on callousness. "You'll have to dig it up. Besides, it's _just_ one can."

"It is not 'just one can,' Jay!" Clark stomped his foot and stalked away to get the can out of the garbage. "It's never 'just one can.' Well, it's always 'just one can.' That's what's causing all our problems," he said from deep inside the belly of the dumpster. The only things Jeremy and I could see were his legs flailing about as he dug deeper and deeper into the leaked garbage.

Jeremy leaned over to me. "Do you really need to be annoying him? He's bipolar, you know."

"He's fun to annoy."

He chuckled. "Yeah, you're kinda right."

"Has he had his medicine?"

"Well, I think so, since he made a big scene in the cafeteria and threw pudding at the principal and the nurse had to drag him away. No point in dragging him away without making him take his medicine."

"Then I think he's stable."

"But that doesn't give you the license to be a jerk!"

"Guys, I got the can!"

We snapped to attention to see Clark proudly holding his dinged-up "prize" in our faces, with leaked garbage covering his arms and all in his hair and even on his face and shirt…but he had the can. Apparently, that was the important thing.

Jeremy squinted and crinkled his nose at the smell of garbage. "Really, buddy? All this over one stupid can?" He laughed. "That really _was_ buried in there! How…"

"_Too_ buried. That makes no sense." I shook my head, knowing that I was going to have to deliver some irksome news to poor Clark. "Besides, that's a Dr Pepper can, and I could have sworn mine was a Pepsi can."

"Let me see that trash." Jeremy sauntered over to the dumpster and peered in. Within seconds, he burst out laughing. "_You got the wrong can_, Clark!" He reached in, grabbed a dented though otherwise intact and very clean Pepsi can, and held it up for the world to see.

Clark shrugged, grabbed the can from Jeremy, and threw them both in the old plastic recycling bin in our driveway just as a red Hybrid pulled up next to us. Inside, Clark's dad honked the horn for him to get in while waving in his normal flamboyant manner at me and Jeremy.

"This," Clark said, rapping the shiny scarlet chrome, "is a Hybrid. Ninety miles to the gallon. It really saves energy." He crawled into the front seat and slammed the door. As it pulled away, he shouted out the window, "You should get one!"

With a snort, I waved halfheartedly at the car, which was by now halfway down the block—Clark's dad was a chronic speeder.

"See ya, nature boy."

After the car had turned the corner at the end of the block, as if Clark could still hear me as long as we could see the car, I turned to Jeremy and rather deliberately informed him, "I have had it just about up to _here_ with the 'environment!'" and stormed into the house with hardly a goodbye.

Looking back now, I know that I should have been kinder to Jeremy then, and I should have been more receptive to what Clark was telling us. But that was before I had any way of knowing…

Exasperated and tired, I put on my pajamas and bathrobe, grabbed my iPod, and lay down in bed, trying to get away from all this for just a few hours… I put on _Sweet Baby James_, closed my eyes, and before the first chorus of the song was over, I was sound asleep.

* * *

**Closing Notes: **Okay, the initial information is over with. Glad I got that out of the way. In the meantime, future updates will most likely be sporadic while I work out some of the logistical issues, rough patches, and whatnot. (And now I have to deal with that stupid internal battle over what's canon and what isn't that every fanfic writer dreads. Should I write around it at the cost of changing a lot of the storyline? Or should I invoke my artistic license and push the date of a significant event back a few years, since my problem is with the timeline?)


	4. Delirious?

**Notes: **All those who can understand the first segment of the chapter, congratulations. I think it's very cryptic; it's supposed to be that way, but I might have overdone it a bit. If I hadn't myself written it, I wouldn't know what the heck was going on. It's one of those things that you really have to read through, and if you miss a sentence, it all falls apart. It's not a very honorable practice, making chapters like that, but I can't seem to get it right just yet... I'd better hone my skills!

**Further Commentary:** Much better than the second chapter. Much, much better, at least in my opinion. Still not my best, though. I hope to pick up momentum and get better as the story goes on, but I'm writing by the seat of my pants here. I usually don't show a word of this stuff until it's done, but I never finish _anything_ without sufficient self-motivation, and I can't let this go to waste. Therefore, it may be difficult to pace it correctly the first time around. The second draft will probably be much more streamlined.

**

* * *

**

**Chapter 4: Delirious?**

**Pandora, Hell's Gate base; September 16, 2150**

As I lay there, falling asleep as my music played, my thoughts began to turn into my dreams. The flashes of neon light I saw in my mind started to come together, forming a sort of tunnel; a moving, swirling torque of pure light and energy. It whizzed by me in all of its blended glory, purple and blue and bright, blinding white, seeming to go on forever.

And then it ended, and I left my trance with a jolt.

I found myself in an odd state of lucidity then, totally aware of myself and the fact that the world around me was a dream.

I tried to stand up, but then lurched forward and fell onto the ground, skidding across it on my side. I felt my whole body on fire with pain, outside and in, with my head throbbing and my chest burning especially.

I couldn't focus my eyes no matter how hard I tried. All I saw were shades of brown and gray, and heard an indistinct, constant buzzing noise.

My head started to get fuzzier with each breath I took. The dream world began to fade, and the noise became dull. I tried to scream; tried to move—but it was impossible.

Then, out of nowhere, something hit me hard and fast in the side, almost like a speeding bullet. The pain I felt then was indescribable, sharp and aching at the same time, throbbing and stinging.

A long, drawn-out wail rose above the background noise, almost inhuman in its sound, and I realized with a sudden chill that it was _me_, crying out in pain.

Footstepts. Footsteps. There were footsteps. I could hear them like bombs going off in the distance.

Another voice joined in with my wails. "Oh, my God," it repeated, over and over again. "Oh…oh…oh, _God_…"

I knew that I was shutting down. Everything was getting fuzzy.

Then, I felt something soft and flexible finding a grip on my chin, and cool air rushed into my mouth and lungs, assuaging the burning for a moment.

I took several deep breaths, feeling the fire in my lungs and throat subside, and then everything went dark.

* * *

Even when I woke up, I didn't open my eyes.

I felt the goosebumps running all up and down my back, my arms, and my legs; the cold air, dry and crisp and sterile, managed to penetrate my pajamas and bathrobe with ease.

I tucked my feet in under me, and realized as my skin rubbed across the bed that the sheets and covers were a lot scratchier than I remembered, and I could have sworn that I'd slept on softer wooden floors than the mattress I was on.

_Must be time to get some new sheets,_ I thought drowsily, still in a daze from my earlier nightmare.

_The nightmare!_

With a sudden shock, I remembered everything—the burning, the pain, the acrid air, the dull colors, the voices…. Even though my throat and eyes were still stinging, it hurt to take deep breaths, and _everything_ around me had a different feel to it, I managed to convince myself that it was the result of allergies and grogginess, combined with an episode of sleep paralysis. Terrifying, yes, but normal; it wasn't the first time I'd had a paralyzing nightmare, and it probably wouldn't be the last.

That's when I finally opened my eyes, only to find a terrible shock. To the left and to the right, there was nothing to see but blinding white walls bathed in fluorescent light, metal cabinets, shiny chrome everything, a large rack with everything from IV drips to syringes to tweezers on it, and a gurney—in fact, the one I was lying on.

This was _not_ where I had gone to sleep last.

When put into that kind of situation, I did what most kids my age would do: that is, I panicked. Tears rolled down my cheeks, my heartbeat was racing, and my breaths were short and fast. All I could even think to do was call wildly to no one in particular, calling for help, calling for someone to come over and talk to me…

"Help!" I yelled, only to be cut off by a series of violent coughs. "Help! Somebody! Anybody!" I pushed myself as hard as I could into my pillow, pulling the corner of my bathrobe over my eyes, refusing to believe what was happening. "Please…help…"

I could hear noise directly outside of the room, slipping in through the crack under the door at the other end. It sounded like people talking urgently as they rushed by. Occasionally, a scream of pure agony would rise above them, followed by more shouts from the others.

What were they _doing_ to that poor guy to make him _scream_ like that?

I shuddered and pulled the covers over my head, lying down flat in an attempt to look invisible to anyone who might look inside. I prayed now that nobody had heard my cry for help, and as the voices and screams grew more distant, it seemed that I was safe for the moment.

I started to poke my head out from under the covers, and then felt the presence of a tall figure looming over me.

Trembling, I cast my gaze upward and saw the sharp, lined, thin face of a middle-aged woman, looking concernedly down at me. Her hair overshadowed her face for her most part, with her curls spiraling so far down that I could smell her shampoo.

"H-hi." I squinted, trying to pick out her features. "Hello, there, um…" I eyed a pair of dog tags around her neck, which read, "Dr. Mildred Jacobson"

"Doctor Mildred Jacobson," I muttered aloud. "Is…is that yours?"

The woman shuddered as she pulled up a swivel chair from somewhere below the gurney. When she sat down and her conspicuously-dyed mahogany hair finally parted, I could see that she was smiling, but wincing at the same time. "I despise that name," she said. "It sounds like a moldy old woman's name. I go by Millie."

"Considerably perkier," I choked out. "Who…exactly who _are_ you?"

Millie pulled up a clipboard from some other unseen place and grabbed a pen from her pocket. "I'm the head of the medical department."

"Head of the medical department of _where_?"

She looked up at me from her writing with a raised eyebrow and a scowl, then went back to scrawling notes, more than likely concerning me. "I have a lot of questions about you, kid," she said, trying to push my own question to the back of her mind.

"I have way more for you than you do for me, trust me."

"Where did you _come_ _from_?" she pursued.

I fidgeted, wriggling my toes and fiddling with the creases on my covers, until Millie repeated her question and added, "We've never seen you before," which was enough to get my heart pumping again.

"Well, of course not. It's a big world out there."

She cocked her eyebrow again and flared her nostrils. "Not here, it isn't. Whose kid are you, anyway?"

"I, uh, I…" I shut my eyes tight. _This can't be happening. This can't be happening._ Now, a feeling of detached denial was coming over me, protecting me from this surreal nightmare. "My mother is Callie Thornton, my father is Matthew Thornton, my brother's name is Tyler Thornton, and that's, uh, that's all…"

At once, Millie reached into her pocket and pulled out something that looked like some sort of cell phone or pager, but much smaller and very sleek, rounded and streamlined and covered with shiny black chrome. It was emblazoned with a logo on the front—a cluster of four circles, two white and two yellow, with the letters "RDA" written next to it in large yellow capitals. There was something else written beneath it, but it was too small for me to read.

"Hey, it's Millie," she spoke to someone on the other end. "Yeah, hi. Listen, I need you to do me a favor here. You know that kid somebody found outside? Wait, what's that? Oh, well, good for you, then—well, yeah, there wasn't really an alternative, was there?"

I sighed. At this rate, whatever we were trying to accomplish here would never get done.

"You were outside and—_what_? I always told you that you were gonna hurt someone one of these days if you weren't careful. I don't care _how_ much practice you've had, something could happen, and then _I_ would be the one dealing with some guy who got hit in the head with a flying—all right, all right! Okay, I need you to check the records for anyone here named Callie Thornton…Matthew Thornton…Tyler Thornton. Okay, thanks, I'll explain later. Bye."

"Is…whatever you were talking about…why something hit me in my side earlier?" I asked. Millie, of course, was too busy writing to answer.

I raised my shirt to look at the spot where whatever it was had hit, and then shuddered in revulsion. It was horribly bruised, from red to purple to blue to black, with veins crisscrossing right below the skin. I would probably always have that scar to show for it, too.

The condition of the bruise caught Millie's attention. She dropped her clipboard and began scrutinizing it, really _probing_ at it, poking it with her finger despite my cries of pain.

"Okay, please, it'll get better!" I pleaded further with her to stop, but to little avail, until she finally stalked off to one of the chrome cabinets, then came back with a pad soaked with some sort of gel.

"Painkiller," she explained as she applied the ointment. The aching disappeared in a matter of seconds.

I managed a smile and a "thank you," then let her examine the bruise until the cell phone-like thing in her pocket went off again.

"Hey, did you find anything?" she chirped to her unseen informant. For a moment, she just silently listened to them, looking almost alarmed, and then sighed with disappointment. "No? Well…uh, okay then. I'll figure this out eventually. Bye again."

She folded the phone and stuck it back into her pocket, staring ahead with a certain emptiness in her eyes. "There's nobody in the database with those names," she muttered, seemingly to herself, and then she regained her composure like nothing had happened. "In the meantime, I had better get some information on you. What's your full name?"

"Jay Cash Thornton."

"Somehow, I expected something a bit more…" She eyed my features carefully, trying to settle on a good word. "…feminine."

"And I'm darn proud of it, too."

"How old are you?"

"Ten, as of the end of last month. The thirty-first, to be exact." I took a deep breath and asked, "What was happening to whoever was outside my room? You know, a few minutes ago, right before you came in?"

"There was a banshee attack outside," Millie said without looking up from her writing.

"Banshee?" I echoed. I had heard my medieval-roleplay-game-obsessed brother talking about banshees before, and he and his friends still passionately claimed that they had seen one up close and personal on a Boy Scout trip, but I didn't know what they were. He told once told me that they were some sort of "restless spirit," but I had a hard time believing that a restless spirit had attacked anybody.

Of course, given the situation I was in, anything was possible.

"I guess you've been hanging out with the Na'vi-sympathizers, then. You know—an _ikran_."

"_Na'vi_? _Ikran_?"

Millie reached up and laid her hand on my forehead, then my neck, then my wrist, trying to discern if there was anything seriously wrong with me. In her doing this, I managed to catch a glimpse of her clipboard and all the information she had written about me. It was mostly illegible, but I could pick out my name, and a bit of a description of what I had gone through: "Thirty seconds outside w/o exomask. No permanent lung damage sustained; treatment is not necessary. Large bruise on side; will probably scar. Apply medication regularly until further notice."

There was another description of my mental state: "Confused, possibly delirious or damaged; claims to know nothing about basics of the moon and the base."

I nearly threw up at that alone, but perhaps the strangest thing was my birth date: "9/31/40."

_But that's impossible,_ I thought as Millie returned to writing, having found nothing physically wrong with me. _Maybe it's just a typo._

"Hey, Millie?" I reached out to tap her on the shoulder, then pointed to the date on the clipboard. "I think the birth date you wrote down…how do I say this tactfully? It, uh, _it has not yet come to pass_."

She narrowed her eyes at me. "Would you please stop talking in riddles?"

"No, I mean, you wrote my birth year down as 2040. By that time, I'll be old! My birthday was in the year 2000."

"What are you talking about?" Millie almost laughed. "The year is 2154!"

"No, it's not. It's 2010." I began to tremble, and tears pooled in my eyes. "Please, please tell me that this is a joke! _Where am I_?"

"You. Are in. The medical wing. Of Hell's Gate."

"Hell's Gate?"

"The RDA colony, Hell's Gate."

My stomach churned violently, and I felt like my heart was about to burst. I scrunched up tightly, tucking my knees in and balling my fists up until my fingernails broke the skin. I didn't care. All I wanted was to go back to sleep, to wake up in Austin, Texas, in my home, in my bed…

"Kid, _look at me_. I don't know who you are, or where you came from, but there is something that I think you should know."

Millie leaned forward and grasped my shoulder, staring straight into my eyes as I waited for a final answer. She took one last deep breath, and then spoke:

"You're on Pandora."

* * *

**Closing:** Hot dog! _Now_ we're getting to the good stuff! (Too bad the format at the top went all screwy, but that's such a minor detail. It's so...so _me _to nitpick something like that.) Thanks for your reviews, by the way. It's given me a lot of encouragement! I hope to return the favor sometime.


	5. Chapter 4

**Notes: **This is, obviously, a heavily revised version of Chapter 4, made to be a little bit clearer than the old one (I tried to do one of those "cliffhanger" things with some shocking closing words, but I already did that with Chapter 3 and couldn't pull it off again successfully without screwing everything up). This will probably be it on revisions of the same chapters over and over again, at least for a while, because I realized that it's probably better to get it the way you want it and figure out if it connects smoothly to the rest of the story, and _then _post it online.

* * *

**Chapter 4**

**Hell's Gate, Pandora; September 16, 2150**

If Millie hadn't been both very kind and very patient, or at least pretended to be, I don't know how we could have survived the following hours.

For a length of time I'll never know, I simply sat up in bed, motionless, wordless, sometimes weeping, sometimes trembling with contained rage, in a state of complete catatonia and shock. Slowly, I began to lapse into fits of fearful muttering, then moaning, wailing, and screaming. At one point, I got so waterlogged from all the tears that I threw up several times in rapid succession.

I tried to tell myself again that this was all only a dream, and when I realized for the final time that it wasn't, I started to beg and scream for my parents or my friends, an explanation for what was going on, or even just for somebody to listen to me.

"Nobody believes me." I curled up into a ball and pulled a pillow over my head. "Nobody will believe me. Nobody. It…it can't be possible."

"I don't know how it could be, either," I heard Millie say as she stroked my hair, trying to soothe me. "The last personnel shipment was two years ago, and the supply ship hasn't even arrived yet…"

I started to wail again, but stopped and poked my head out of my nest of pillows when I heard the door open. Another lab-coated man, a short Indian-American fellow with an unkempt beard and frizzy hair, walked in, holding my iPod in his hand.

"I was told to deliver this to you. You still had it in your ears when they found you out there. Not a scratch on it," he told me as he laid it down on the pillow next to me. "It looks like a really old model. I've never seen it before."

"It's a Classic." I wiped my eyes on my sleeve, happy to have a tangible link to my home and life. "It's a bit cumbersome, but it holds a lot of stuff. Music, movies, photos…I never go anywhere without it. Thank you so much for bringing it." I picked it up and held it close to my chest. "You don't know how much I need something like this right now."

"I can imagine," he replied with a smile. "I don't know what you're going through right now, but it's probably a big story."

Millie nodded and started to rub her temples.

"Not much happens around here anymore," the man continued, "so when we find a hitherto unknown kid outside without an exomask almost two years after any ship landed here, it really gets around."

I guess Millie couldn't stand not telling somebody else about this, so she pulled him to the side (where I could still very well hear them) and started to explain the situation, constantly adding notes about just how unlikely everything was and how she couldn't possibly believe me, and so on. It nearly broke my heart just to listen. People were going to think I was childish at best, downright insane at worst. I would be shunned—but there was simply no other explanation for what happened.

"Max, it's impossible, I know, but this girl…" She shook her head. "All I can say is, nobody could fake that kind of physical and emotional reaction. For that matter, nobody would even _want_ to. She didn't lie about anything."

"I understand." Max shifted his weight from side to side as he considered the story, then sighed. "Do you mind if I stay here? I think you could use a little help."

"_Please_." Millie heaved a grunt of pure exasperation.

"I'm sure Grace won't mind once we explain the circumstances."

"But before we do, all hell will break loose."

"You guys don't seriously think I can't here you when you're just on the opposite side of the room, right?" I interrupted. Their responding smiles made me feel worlds better and much more welcome. "My parents always do that. I can be in the tub and they'll be chattering away about my latest random shortcoming in the next room, thinking that I can't hear a word they say."

They both chuckled, giving me encouragement to go on.

"I think this is both to my benefit and my peril, sometimes. I can hear everything they say, which usually gives me an advantage, but see, it works conversely—I talk to myself sometimes about things I wouldn't want them to hear."

When I saw the positive reaction and obvious interest the two had in me, this little girl whom they had never seen before, who claimed that she was from the past, I decided to use this to my advantage and tell every significant story from my ten years of life that I could think of. I described my friends and family, told them about my interests, my likes and my dislikes, showed them music on my iPod (it was still on _Sweet Baby James_, the mere thought of which is enough to soothe me) as well as some movies and pictures.

Neither of them knew of a single song or movie I showed them, and were fascinated by the pictures.

"Everything is so lush and green," said Max, seemingly in awe of a picture that I had taken with my dogs, then-puppy Juniper and ancient Azura shortly before her death that summer, when I was nine. I was smiling and laughing and had Juniper cradled in one arm, her wrinkly hound dog skin drooping, with the other thrown around Azura's thick, furry neck, with her lips pulled back in an anthropomorphic grin and her blue tongue lolling. We were in the middle of an enormous field of bluebonnets by our old church, a favored family photo-taking spot in the summer.

"Well, of course," I replied, perplexed. "It's just a common misconception that Texas is full of nothing but sand and cacti. Austin is really lovely in the summer."

"Girl, I was raised in Texas, and as far as I know, Austin is just another barren metropolis," Millie said, "like every other big city on Earth."

I rested my head on my knees and sighed. _Oh, no, not more _hippies_! No crazy environmentalist hippies! Please, no more hippies, God. Haven't I gone through enough today?_

"Now, I know there might be a few problems, but I'm sure they're not that bad and not worth brooding over, like my teacher does."

"Your teacher?" Max raised an eyebrow.

"Yeah, my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Bean."

"No, I mean, you went to _school_?"

"Well, yeah. Don't kids still go to school? I can't see that changing for a while yet."

"You look a bit young to have stowed away on an ISV ship. I thought you might have been born here."

"_Stowed away_…" I echoed. "But I _wasn't_ born here. You haven't seen me before, have you? And surely you don't really _think_ that, right?"

Both remained silent. It was clear that I had a long and hard road ahead of me.

"Well, it's not true. I'm never going to convince you that what I'm saying is true, am I? Don't think I don't know how hopeless this is." I sighed, thankful that I wasn't quite able to wrap my head around what was going on. I knew that if I could, my mind would go haywire. "In the meantime, I'm already on Pandora, whatever or wherever in the great universe Pandora _is_, and the best thing I can do is orient myself for now and worry about what happened later."

Max patted my shoulder. "It sounds like a good plan to me."

Just then, the sound of a woman's voice came ringing down the hall outside the room, sounding ready to interrupt the peace even more. The two adults obviously knew this, too; they exchanged worried glances and seemed to be bracing themselves for disaster. Millie rolled her eyes and groaned.

"Max!" the voice called, clearly nearer now. "Max! Where are you?"

Max stood up and walked toward the door. He stuck his head out, greeting the woman, who was now right outside.

"Where the hell have you been?" she demanded. "We could have used you—"

"I know, I know, I'm sorry, Grace. Before you get upset, I've gotta tell you: I've been dealing with this kid in here, and—"

"So that's the one, huh?"

"Yeah. She seems a bit confused and…um, profoundly disturbed,"—I didn't like the sound of that—"and I thought Millie needed some help."

"She can't be that much of a problem. How old is she? Eight, nine…"

"Ten," said Millie from the bedside.

The woman pushed past Max and poked her head in the doorway. Even from far away, I could see her ferocious green eyes glinting as they stared me down, her red hair falling in her face. "If she's that young," she said to Millie, who was clearly ready to take her claws out, "then what the hell is she doing here?"

"_Well_, Grace, she's _here_ because it appears that she was outside for nearly a minute without an exomask and acquired a serious bruise on her side because—"

"Don't be sarcastic! I mean _here_, as in the base!" The woman—Grace, it seemed—barged into the room and sat in Max's swivel chair as she continued to look me over. "What's your name, kid?"

"Jay Cash Thornton, at your service."

"And how, pray tell, did you get here?" Grace almost smiled at me, but put on her fiery air so quickly again that I could easily have imagined it. She took out a cigarette and a lighter—again stainless steal and emblazoned with the letters "RDA"—and sat back in her chair after lighting it, waiting for an answer.

I wriggled my toes, knowing that the true answer would not be well-met. "Um…I don't know. I went to sleep in my bedroom one day—a normal school day, like any other—and then I woke up here." I bit my lip. Should I go further? "Millie says the year is 2150…which is about a hundred and forty years ahead of what I thought it was."

Grace didn't miss a thing. Incredulous, she lurched forward and grabbed the cold metal railings on the bedside, leaning in inches from my face. "You mean to tell me that you're from the _past_?"

No turning back now. "Looks like. I can't think of any other explanation."

"You were right, Max. If _that's_ not disturbed, I don't know what is." Grace blew a plume of foul blue-gray smoke in my face. It burned a flaming trail down my nose and throat as I inhaled it, and I started coughing.

"Grace!" Millie practically screamed, grabbing the cigarette and snuffing it with her shirt. "You can't just chain-smoke in a medical room like that, especially considering that this kid—a _kid_!—has been _outside_ in _toxic air_ for a whole minute!"

Thankfully, Grace realized her mistake instantly, and seemed truly apologetic. "I'm sorry," she said, patting me on the shoulder. "Really sorry, kiddo."

"S' all right," I said between final coughs. "It's hard to believe. I'm still having trouble coming to terms with it myself."

At that moment, Millie declared most abruptly that she was needed in the other room (in a voice that clearly said that she wasn't telling the truth) and stalked off. Grace seemed somewhat miffed at this, but unsurprised nonetheless.

"Those two have never gotten along," Max murmured to me as Grace took out another cigarette, seemingly out of sheer habit. I only nodded as the two adults began to quietly talk to each other about something. Something important-sounding. Something I didn't understand. Something that didn't concern me, most importantly; I had no reason to try and decipher it. I settled into my pillows, where it was nice and warm and soft, and then I dozed off.

* * *

I had no idea how long I had been asleep when I woke up. I was sunk even deeper into my nest, with only my eyes and nose exposed. I took a breath and poked the rest of my head out, and looked around the room. Grace and Max were gone, and my iPod was lying next to me on the bed.

The only sound was a gentle, glassy tapping sound coming from somewhere behind me. I turned my head up, trying to see who was making it and how.

_A window_, I thought, blinking against the glare of the lights reflecting off the small square of glass above my head. _I didn't know there was a window there._

I turned over and sat up on my stiff, aching knees and brought my head to the level of the window. The tapping suddenly became wild, frantic almost, but then it stopped, and I found myself staring directly into a pair of laughing blue eyes.

I was struck at once, almost captivated, and peered deeper into those eyes, which, in turn, seemed to be peering into my own—they were clear and slate-colored, almost goofy-looking, and full to the brim with mirth.

My heart fluttered. I had seen eyes like that before—those were my brother's eyes. They weren't exact, of course, but they were close, and that was enough for me.

I blinked once, and when I looked back into the window, whoever had been standing on the other side was gone. All I could see was the hallway outside, and some equipment propped against the opposite wall.

I turned and slumped down onto my pillows, dazed and disheartened.

"Incredible," I muttered. "I must be going mad." Thoughts of insanity raced through my head. Had my entire life been all some sort of hallucination; just one big dream? Was I really from the past? Or was I just delirious, amnesiac, just some delusional little lost kid nobody cared about?

Footsteps sounded outside my room, and for a moment, I thought that I was hallucinating those as well, until the door flew open and hit the wall so hard that it would have rebounded right into the face of whomever had opened it, had they not leaped well beyond rebound distance and across the room in but one second.

I shook my head to clear it, and there, by my bedside, stood a tall, thin young man—not past his late twenties was my guess—in baggy swamp-green pants and a T-shirt of about the same color, and a relatively thick leather-bound book was tucked under his arm. He was panting and grinning from ear to ear, showcasing straight, white teeth. And huge dimples. Sandy blond hair, lifted off of his forehead in short gelled spikes. A cheerful, handsome face. Blue eyes.

_Blue eyes!_

I shot up and threw myself off the bed, even though it hurt just to move. Every single muscle had gone stiff, and the painkilling ointment on my side had worn off. Still, I managed to drag myself up to my tiptoes and stare into those eyes again, and joy and relief washed over me—I hadn't been hallucinating anything. Those were _definitely_ the eyes from the window, the eyes that looked so much like my brother's, like little Tyler's…

"So this is you, huh?" he said. I could hear a slight break in his tenor voice. He was trembling. "Wow. I can see it. I can totally see it. You have the right eyes for it."

I sat down on the bed in shock and confusion. Could this day get any weirder? "Eyes for what?"

The man shook his head vigorously and blinked. "Oh. Sorry. I was just…nothing. I-I'll show you. Just sit down."

"Uh…I _am_ sitting down."

"Oh, um…right. Yes." The young man sat beside me and placed his book on his lap. The front cover read "Family Tree" in embossed golden letters. "Oh, sorry—my name is Tristan. Tristan Fairweather."

"Jay Cash Thornton," I said, extending my hand. Instead of taking it, Tristan hugged me, pressing my face into the fabric of his shirt until I couldn't breathe, though I was sure he didn't mean to.

"I already know your n—" I heard his breath catch. "—oh. Oh. Uh, right." He pulled me away, and promptly began to ramble. "Sorry," he said. "Sorry. I guess I should, um…should have waited for that. I mean that, uh…let me explain. I'll, uh, I guess I'll just…show this to you…"

I raised an eyebrow. _This had better be good._

Tristan opened the book to its last full page, glossy and transparent, holding a small picture of himself—a photo album. The book was a photo album.

"See," he said, pointing to the picture, "that's me. Fresh out of college and scientists' training. Getting ready to board the ship here for a six-year ride, frozen like a popsicle. And the rest of them are all my family members."

He flipped to the front page and handed me the book. "Be gentle with this. It's my prized possession."

I nodded and looked at the page. In its clear pocket was an old, old black-and-white portrait of my great-great-grandparents, one that I recognized from the bridal room in my grandparents' house.

Chills burst from my spine and went all through my body, and when I flipped to the next page, I was already trembling.

Another portrait, one from my grandparents' hallway—my Greatmom and Jim-Pa (as my mother always referred to them), when they were young and just married. I was always vague on who they were; Jim-Pa and Greatmom had been forbidden to see each other and instead courted via notes left for each other under a special rock in the woods, and then they had ended up eloping after mere months. Greatmom had only died of a stroke in the past five years, and Jim-Pa of alcohol poisoning years and years before.

Next to this portrait was a color photo of Greatmom in her advanced age, standing next to her daughter, my great-aunt Sabrina, with whom she had spend the last ten years of her life. I looked at the label—Emmy Hadley and daughter Sabrina Lancaster, 2004. Only a year before Greatmom's death. I remembered the days leading up to it, and going to visit her in the hospital in Dallas, when I was just a toddler. I remembered that Mom was crying a lot and talking on the phone with a grave expression on her face and always hugging me and sobbing into my clothes. I was also made to speak to a lot of tearful relatives over the phone—including Cousin Jessamine, who was only one year older, but clearly understood something that I didn't and refused to tell me what. I only knew that something bigger than my own little five-year-old world was going on around me…but I didn't know exactly what it was, much less did I really care.

When the funeral came, I knew that someone had died, and that it was Greatmom. I understood the concept of death. She was going to be with God in Heaven, and I would never be seeing her again. But I only felt a twinge of grief; I was sad for my family and wished that I could cheer everyone up somehow and just wipe away all their tears, but I didn't know Greatmom, so I didn't shed any tears of my own.

Only then, as I sat staring at that photo, did I finally have to wipe my eyes, pick myself up, and move away from my grief—only I had to do it in one minute, and not weeks or months like my family.

On the next page, there was a photograph, a real one this time, but only in black-and-white. It was faded and smudged and tattered, but not beyond recognition. It was yet another from my grandparents' house, this one being of my grandfather himself when he was just a boy, working on the farm with his brother Wells.

I had to smile from myself as another memory came back to me, assuaging my sadness for a moment. It was of me and Cousin Jessamine looking at that photo in the bedroom, observing the grainy quality and the lack of color with Gramps standing behind us, with that smile on his face that only a proud grandfather could have…

* * *

"_You see, girls," Gramps had said, one furry and calloused hand on each of our shoulders, "that was made before pictures were made in color."_

"_You mean, before colors were invented?" asked Jessamine, her pitch rising in wonder and amazement._

_Gramps nodded._

"_You mean before there was green grass or blue skies?"_

_I rolled my eyes. "No, Jess. Colors were always around. Cameras just couldn't take pictures in color until later." I wondered why Gramps found all this so funny. This wasn't Jessamine's first egregious mistake. She was a full year older than me, but that didn't matter much, because she didn't seem to know anything about proper grammar or spelling or pronunciation, or about how the world worked in general. Dyslexia would do that to somebody, and if you were to combine that with a wild imagination and spacey head, then you had a lot of mistakes on your hands._

"_Okay, okay!" Jessamine elbowed me hard in the side. She always had the boniest elbows and knees, and she dared call me a wimp when they inevitably struck me and caused a bruise. "I didn't know! I'm only seven! Gimme a break!"_

"_Uh-huh. And I'm only five. Almost six. But still five."_

_Jessamine grinned and wrapped her arm around me. "Okay. We're even. We're cousins again." She squeezed me around the shoulders, and I smiled. All was well once more between us, like it always was._

* * *

I snapped out of my thoughts with a jolt, and found myself staring at the photos again. I flipped one page, then another—my own grandparents, Gramps and Mumsie's siblings, Grandma Thornton's two sisters (I had always wondered what they'd looked like in life), and Grandpa Thornton himself, though I had never known him. Uncles. Aunts. Cousins, once or twice removed. Older cousins, some of whom I had never even met, and second cousins I didn't even know I had. As the number of pages grew, so did the number of people and names that struck chords somewhere, deep in the recesses of my memory, until I got to people I not only recognized, but knew. People on whose laps I had sat when I was a toddler. People who had sent Christmas cards and money and called me on my birthday. People who e-mailed us and called almost every day.

Then came my younger cousins, the ones I had played with since I was an infant; I knew their personality traits and their likes and dislikes, their favorite games, what they ate…. Teenaged Kathy and baby Chester, who had never lived to see his first month. Harold and Alicia, when they were only my age. Caleb and Gina, constant playmates during family reunions in Illinois. Little Jasper and Jessamine—Jessamine!

I turned another page. There was Tyler. Second-grade Tyler, just as I had left him only hours before. Toddler Tyler, playing in his preschool classroom, the same classroom I had played in when I was little. Baby Tyler, chunky and toothless, but smiling at the camera, naked and face-down on his baby blanket. Tyler. My beautiful blue-eyed baby brother.

And there, next to Tyler, was me. Jay Cash Thornton herself, staring back at me through the clear plastic page.

I put the book down and rubbed my eyes, trying to clear the tears away, and then looked back down. The picture hadn't changed. It was old. It was a bit grainy. But it was still me, just my face, against the backdrop of a blurry blue-and-green field of Texas bluebonnets. The label below the photo couldn't have been any clearer: Jay Cash Thornton, c. 2010. Only two months ago. Two months plus a century and a half.

That was when my heart started to pound, sweat poured from my temples and ran down my face, and it hit me once and for all that a hundred and forty years and two months was a very, very, very long time to be gone.

* * *

I stared up at the white ceiling much as I had when I woke up for the first time on this new place, this purported "alien planet." Only this time it wasn't as scary and unfamiliar. This time, it was comforting.

I focused on the white. The pure, unblemished white. Blank. Blank like I was trying to make my mind. I wanted to forget everything. I wanted to forget that I was on a new world right now, a hundred and forty years and two months into the future, where people probably thought I was insane I didn't have any connection to anyone. Except for the man in front of me, some sort of distant future relative (I had no idea what he was to me yet), sitting on the edge of the bed in ecstatic silence, patiently waiting for me to gather my thoughts.

But I didn't want any thoughts. I wanted to forget him, too, and forget that perplexing photo album that had brought back this vast ocean of long-dormant memories that just served to cloud my thoughts even more and make my head hurt and remind me that no matter what, I could never see them again except by the grace of God. And if I could never see them again, there was no use thinking about them, so why couldn't I forget them, too?

I could have forgotten my own name just then, and it would have been a wondrous relief to at least take some weight off my aching mind.

And yet, there was so much that I had to know.

I shuddered, and Tristan pounced on the first sign that I was coming around. "So…" He leaned forward, tense with anticipation. "What do you think about all this?"

"Good sir, my brain is on overload. I don't know what to think about any of it." I groaned. "So I'm trying not to. Got any Tylenol? Advil? Aspirin of any sort? Knockout drugs, even? My head is pounding."

"Afraid I'm not that kind of doctor. Damn, I always wanted to say that!" Tristan couldn't beat back his smile, though he tried to look somewhat sympathetic. "Well…" He put out his hands two feet apart from each other, palms upturned and fingers spread. "I can't believe it, I mean…you're here! I'm your family!"

I nodded slowly. "Then what does that make me, in relation to you? Are you a direct descendant"—I remembered my promise to myself never to have children, and cursed myself for even possibly going back on my word. I just hoped that it was at least after I was married—"or are you something of a seventh cousin three or four times removed? If that's possible."

"Well, guess what? We get to reach a compromise."

I propped myself up on my elbows and cocked my head. "Do tell."

"I'm a direct descendant of your brother. His great-great-great-grandson. And that makes you my great-great-great-great-aunt."

"I feel really…old." I sighed and put my head back down. "Something tells me that this should surprise me. But it doesn't." It's the eyes, I almost said, but I decided against it. "To tell you the truth, after what I've been through today, I don't think I'll ever be surprised at anything ever again."

"I…I can see that." Tristan patted me on the shoulder and stood up. "Can I get you something to eat?"

"Don't know how long it's been since lunch. How long ago did I get here?"

"What time did you go to sleep when you were at home last?"

"You've heard about that? It's kind of a small detail."

"Hey, it's a small world here, at the Hell's Gate base. When something like this happens, it gets around. Every little detail."

"Well, in that case, I don't know. About three-thirty, maybe?"

"It's almost eight in the evening now. Only twilight outside. Do you want to come watch the sunset with me? It's really beautiful, like nothing you've ever experienced on Earth, I guarantee it!"

I smiled, but shook my head. "I'm sure there'll be other sunrises and sunsets. It looks like I might be here for a while. Really, I'm too exhausted to move."

"Oh." Tristan looked a bit disappointed. It almost made me want to go with him. "Then…can I still get you something to eat?"

My stomach rumbled at exactly the right moment so that I didn't have to answer "yes." I hadn't eaten anything since my meager lunch at school.

School. Just earlier that day. Surrounded by friends and familiarity. Comfortable. At home. In my element. And now, I was as far away from it all as humanly possible. If I wanted to make myself comfortable and in my element here, wherever here was, I would have to start from scratch, and I could do that by warming up to Tristan.

"Sure. I could go for that." I put on my brightest, most sincere smile. "Do you know two people named Grace and Max, by any chance?"

"You mean my friends? My immediate superiors? Just two of the people that I, as a researcher, talk to every day? Yeah, I know 'em."

"Do you know where they are?"

"They popped up in the lab about an hour and a half ago, telling everyone about you. I guess you were already asleep again by that time."

"Then could you maybe talk to them? Tell them about…about the book and everything?"

"I'll do that if I see them. It's about dinnertime in the cafeteria." He stood up from the bed and looked down at me imploringly. "You sure you don't want to come with me? I'm sure you'd be the center of attention. There are so many people I want you to meet."

I'm not a people person, I thought. But I knew better than to say it out loud—it had never worked for me before. "I'll wait until tomorrow. I've gotten so much sleep, but I still feel exhausted."

"Something like this will do that to a person, I guess," said Tristan, shrugging. "I'm gonna be back in a few minutes. Don't move."

"I'll listen to my iPod."

"Can I listen to it later?" he asked, pausing when he was halfway out the door. "I want to know what people listened to, back in your day."

"Okay, but it's only fair of me to warn you that I'm not the best example of what people listened to back then. But maybe you'll recognize some stuff. Who knows? It's possible that I've invested in some future classics." I grabbed the iPod from the side of the bed and set it on my stomach. "But why would you want to know."

"I'm an anthropologist. I love all kinds of history."

"I'm sure you'd enjoy all my dad's election podcasts on here, then." Personally, I didn't really see what being an anthropologist had to do with loving history, but I found it plausible that they could go hand-in-hand, and at least it did something to explain Tristan's keen knowledge of genealogy, which I found unusual (but it made for a great coincidence).

"Cool. I'll see you in a minute!"

The door shut, leaving me alone. In silence. Again.

I put in the headphones and flicked the switch.

_So goodnight, you moonlight ladies_  
_Rock-a-bye sweet baby James…_

I must have listened to that song five times before Tristan came back with a whole tray full of food precariously balanced on one arm and a can of Dr Pepper in the other. He had that big grin on his face again; the bright-eyed, dimpled grin that he wore when he first saw me in person, not just as some old photograph. I was starting to really like that grin.

He set the tray down in front of me, and I was very pleased at what was on it. Pickle spears, battered and pre-fried and probably heated in some sort of toaster (I had always wondered when somebody was going to come up with that). Cheese-filled jalapeno peppers, and tater tots and curly fries next to them, prepared the same way. Still-frozen chocolate chip waffles, smothered in some sort of chocolate spread—I recognized it by the smell to be Nutella or some variant. A clear-wrapped fudge popsicle next to them, and next to that, three nondescript white pills.

"These two are Aspirin and a mild sleep aid, respectively," Tristan said, singling out one of the pills. "And this one over here is what is colloquially known as a Fizz Pill, if you want your drink carbonated." He handed me the can of soda. "Don't mix them up."

"Isn't that already carbonated?"

"Exactly. Double carbonation. Try it. It's awesome."

"Sweet." I sat up. "How did you know I liked all this stuff?"

There was that grin again. "A spare-time amateur genealogist has his ways. I know some of these kinds of things; bits and pieces like this about a lot of family members. I'm going to need you to fill in all the rest for me."

I took a bite of toaster-prepared fried pickle spear and grinned. "I think I can handle that. But it will take a while, if I tell you everything I can remember. Days and days."

"I have all the time in the world," he said. "And so will you."

I swallowed. "I guess you're right. No school. No homework. No housework, either. Perpetual summer."

"Lucky you."

"I guess I won't get much of a formal education, then. No education, no job. No real life. Just along for the ride."

"I can introduce you to the science department, and the military security forces, and the corporate executives—we've got it all here. Make no mistake: you're going to learn a lot." Tristan patted me on the shoulder. "As much as you want. As fast as you want. Whenever you want. However you want."

"Sounds different than Westlake Elementary."

"It's the adult world, Jay. As of right now, you are the only one of your kind. That means that, rather than scale everything down to kid-level for one person, you will be held on the same plane as—but not to the same standards as—the adults. You can't be expected to be under everyone's absolute orders all the time, and even if you are, what can they do? Put you in the time-out corner if you don't get your homework signed?"

I leaned back a bit and sighed. "You know, it sounds like I might kind of grow to like it here."

"You will."

I finished my meal as Tristan ate his own cold dinner of a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and trail mix, and I must say I felt rather sorry for him, but I was far too hungry to even think about giving him some of my food.

"Are you going to sleep here tonight?" he asked as I finished the last of my soda.

"I guess so."

"You sleep with any sort of light on? I could turn on the bathroom light and crack the door."

"That works." I set my tray on the table, figuring that I would move it in the morning. "There isn't any danger in this place, right?"

Tristan almost laughed, as if the notion were too preposterous to take seriously. "The security system here is top-notch. Nothing could plausibly get past the perimeter of the base, much less inside. I think you're safe." He yawned and gave an exaggerated stretch. "I'm going to my room now. We'll get you your own room tomorrow. There are some good empty ones in the scientists' quarters."

He turned to walk out the door, but the stopped. "No, screw that. I'll go get an extra bed. I'm staying in here tonight. If that's all right by you."

The hairs on the back of my neck rose, and I remembered all those lectures about strangers that they had given us in school and all those television programs about kidnapped children…but then I remembered how cold and empty and lonely the room had been earlier, and I found that with Tristan in there, it wasn't so lonesome anymore.

"That's fine by me. I've been alone enough for one day."

He's a good guy, I told myself, and he's your kin. An ally in a situation like this is something you can't afford to do without. You can't play by elementary school rules all your life, Jay—Stranger Danger, and all that. Let it go. Everyone's a stranger here. You have no choice but to trust your gut.

"Okay." Tristan left and came back five minutes later already in pajamas and lugging a bed through the doorway behind him.

"That was fast," I remarked.

Tristan pulled the bed up to the wall and crawled under the covers. "You learn to get things done fast here."

"Good night."

"G'night." Tristan tossed and turned for a few minutes, then settled, and began to hum some familiar tune under his breath.

I leaned closer and silenced my breath. It was _Sweet Baby James _again. And, just as I had said before, I truly was not surprised.

After hearing that, I was able to sleep soundly for the rest of the night, not because I was tired, not because of the calming song, but because I knew that for all the troubles I was sure to be facing over the next days or weeks or even months, there was somebody here, right next to me, who would always know just what to do.

* * *

Please, please give me some constructive criticism here. I need to know where I can improve on this!


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